


Hold My Own

by ERNest



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell, Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Forests, Found Family, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Poverty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-04 17:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16350635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Fantine's path intersects with that of a woman who doesn't squint into the wind, and together they build their own road.





	Hold My Own

Fantine meets a girl who does not squint into the wind — or maybe girl isn’t the right word. They’re about the same age, but something about this woman makes her seem older and if not wiser, then less breakable somehow.

“Aren’t you afraid of the dust?”

“No.” Sensing something more is needed, she adds, “Why would I? Dust gets everywhere anyway; why not my eyes too?”

“Oh,” says Fantine. This makes a sad kind of sense so she tries it out but the sting makes her cheeks burn and she turns away. “I guess I still like things to be nicer than I deserve,” she mutters. “Even though it’s too late for that.”

The woman eyes Fantine up and down, assessing her potential as a friend. “I’m Eurydice,” she says at last.

“Oh! What a lovely name!” Her enthusiasm bubbles over into this finally familiar ground. “My little one, her name is Euphrasie, so you and she would make a good set! Well, that’s the name her father chose, which makes it official, but she’s Cosette in my heart.”

“Oh, may I meet her sometime?” asks Eurydice, who has never had the slightest interest in children until right this moment. She does not expect her face to fall like that.

“Maybe — maybe later. I couldn’t bring her with me, not with her father gone. You know how people talk.”

“Yes. I know.”

 

-/-/-

 

Fantine was fired at the end of winter and by the time she meets Eurydice, the Lady Persephone already has both feet solidly on the ground up top. Life is getting harder and the purse strings are getting tighter from all the money she has to send back to the Thénardiers, but they are still in a summertime frame of mind. There is enough light to sew clothes whenever she’s not sleeping, and the nights are warm enough that she doesn’t need to spend money on wood or fuel when her thin blanket will do.

Without either one of them being quite aware of how it happened, Eurydice has moved in with Fantine and they share the rent and the cost of the food. With the extra help she manages to avoid falling behind on furniture payments, though she continually apologizes for sending so much of their shared earnings away.

“It’s for your daughter,” Eurydice always says. I can’t begrudge you that.”

This time feels almost like a vacation, even with the vague glimmers on the horizon. Fantine begins to laugh as she passes the factory doors each day, not only out of spite for its owner, but because she remembers the cramped working space and relentless gossip, and is glad to be free of it.

 

-/-/-

 

She remembers that final outing in Paris and finds in the touch of Eurydice’s hand that same pastoral perfection. She held herself apart from all the coquettish games at the time, but she thinks she understands Zéphine and Dahlia better than before. Maybe they were putting on a show, but something real flourished between them. In the circle of Eurydice’s arms, Fantine feels it now, too.

But if she knows a little more of affection, she *certainly* knows more of its loss. Before she ran into Eurydice and her steely determination she’d been ready to throw herself at the first comer, and if he mistreated her, so much the better! Each bruise would serve as confirmation that no one was worthy of trust. She could see her future of bitterness mapped out before her as clearly as if she’d already lived it, and though she never took that hateful lover, imagination is as good as memory.

In contrast to a life of abandonment after abandonment, how can she _not_ be afraid of her love for Eurydice, who chooses to stay? It is overwhelming, a revelation, and behind her eyes is always the awareness that she might still leave. After all, when she was younger and more foolish, she really believed that Tholomyès would stay, if not for her then for their daughter. In her mind there was not even the possibility that he could leave, and in his there was not even the possibility that he would not.

At least if Eurydice leaves her, it will not be from callousness, but because she will have easily found a better option elsewhere. Fantine cannot decide if this is a comfort.

 

-/-/-

 

When the wind changes, of course Eurydice is the first to notice it. The onset of autumn stirs something in her halfway between giddy anticipation and a horror so deep it’s almost paralyzing. This browning at the edges comes round every year and it never gets any easier. The voices just out of the range of hearing remind her that if she makes it through another winter it will be by luck, just like all the other winters since she was born into a too-large family. Before she can lie down forever though, three voices fade into one singing a song she’s never heard complete. For all she knows, it still isn’t.

And — a train whistle? But locomotives are still such a new invention, and hardly anyone believes they can contribute to meaningful progress. So why would a season of endings be heralded by a technology barely born?

Fantine hears none of this, even when Eurydice points it out, though she dutifully moves her sewing station closer to the window to make the best use of the waning twilight and agrees to let one candle work for both of them. Eurydice must remember that this is still a child who hasn’t spent a winter of uncertainty with no one to provide for her in a long time, if she ever did. And not many people can hear the seasons like she does.

Eurydice has seen the world and been nearly buried beneath its weight; Fantine makes it beautiful. It’s not the golden hair or gleaming teeth that are worth a lot to her, however. Eurydice sees her joy when brushing her hair, and the picture she makes when she laughs, and knows those features are more valuable as part of a living person than they could ever be in a wig or a set of dentures. She feels her smile soften whenever Fantine talks about her daughter, and the nights they trade songs from their youth are what keep her warm.

 

-/-/-

 

Fantine is making terrific progress at learning her alphabet, but she’s not quite there so it still falls to Eurydice to read aloud the letters from M. Thénardier demanding more money for the care of Cosette. She can read between the lines and suspects the girl’s care is lacking wherever profit can be made in its place, but she always softens the news for the sake of the mother who is kept healthier by her faith that she is helping her daughter.

This letter is different — Fantine makes her read it in full three more times as she contemplates each painful detail. Eurydice would warn her not to overexcite herself, but she knows very well that sometimes a person just needs to dwell a little. At last Fantine says in a very small voice, “My child is cold.” Without pausing to put on a shawl she rises to leave their room.

Several hours later she returns with a shorn head and a bundle containing a heavy wool skirt sized for a child of seven. “I have clothed Cosette in my hair,” she announces, happier than she’s been in weeks. Eurydice is familiar with rivers that spill gold from their banks and trees that bow down to offer fruit, and birds who pluck feathers from their backs, and she says nothing.

The next day they post the skirt.

 

-/-/-

 

With her hair gone Fantine is diminished by more than its physical weight and day by day she grows even sadder and smaller than before. It’s not vanity, Eurydice knows, but the sudden loss of a necessary distraction, and the realization that her sacrifice was not enough to return everything to where it belonged. Her lover is curling into a space that Eurydice soon won’t be able to reach, and she knows how these things go.

And the letters keep coming to demand ever more payment, even as prison labor forces their own wages further down. She knows what she could never say: they might be able to work their way into a more tolerable situation if these extortion fees weren’t forever hanging over their heads.

She watches Fantine dance out the door laughing about the military fever and the two Napoleons it will mean and bites her lip. It’s an absurd amount of money, of course, but the illness is not. There’s a chance that it was invented to squeeze more payment out of them, and to take that chance would be deadly. Fantine is not laughing when she returns: she fumes about a traveling dentist she encountered, a juggler of teeth.

“And what did he offer you for them?” she asks, and winces. Even before she learns the going rate is one Napoleon per incisor, she knows that Fantine will piece it together sooner or later. Something bad is going to happen and she can think of no way to stop it.

 

-/-/-

 

There is only one person between her and the dentist. When she first arrived at the Tillac d’Argent and caught sight of his carriage she couldn’t help but fidget and tap her foot, mind too full of what was coming to stay still. Now she stands calm and resolute. There will be pain, and it will be worth it to fulfill her purpose here.

“Come home with me.” Eurydice stands just too far off to touch and stares at her feet instead of her eyes.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she murmurs.

“No, _please_ , you still have the chance to say no!” A hand as steady as earth grips her limp one. “Not home to the apartment, but all the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, Fantine, I’ve thought it all out. We go to Montfermeil, take Cosette back, and then we keep going to where my people are from. We can walk, I know the way.”

“And then what?”

“There’s a man there, my—” Eurydice blinks. “My brother.”

“He’ll take care of us?”

“We’ll take care of each other. That’s how the world could be, and Orpheus always saw it in spite of everything. And all three of us will take care of Cosette.”

“We’ll keep on walking, come what may?”

“We will.”

 

-/-/-

 

Eurydice keeps her eyes on her overpriced stew and does her best to look unimportant. She wanted to charge in as a team and argue eloquently for the release of the child, but there is every chance that they will need a backup plan and it will help if one of their faces goes unknown. Besides, this is Fantine’s fight, and Eurydice is better at improvising.

A man complains loudly that his horse has not had enough water and the innkeeper’s wife hurries to mollify him. When a small girl emerges from under a table to swear up and down that she has brought enough water from the well, Eurydice has to catch her breath. Cosette is about seven now, and a child of that age needs more meat on her bones.

The sight brings with it the memory of days she’d almost faint from hunger and it’s all she can do to stick to the plan, when she wants instead to knock over her chair demanding justice. She needs to stay invisible, which should be easy when most people tend to look right past her. Something that causes her grief is now an asset, and that almost makes her smile when everything else about this scene just makes her want to lie down and weep.

When the tavern door opens to admit Eurydice’s lover there ought to be a hush over the room in anticipation of a mother’s strength. But this is a novel and she has mostly stopped holding her breath for applause at dramatic moments. Her eyes follow Fantine to the Thénardiess and drop back to the table as she summons her husband. Her foot taps out a rhythm that feels like confrontation and hopes it will lend her the courage she needs.

 

-/-/-

 

"I've come to bring her home," Fantine says again.

"Oh, but that's not how business works," laughs the inkeeper. "If it's in this tavern, I own it."

"No. I sent you money every month to provide for my daughter, and it was always meant to be temporary. This--" She gestures at the threadbare rags, the hollow cheeks, the wooden bowl, the gigantic broom. "--was never part of the deal."

"And _you_  stopped paying," Thénardier singsongs, victorious.

“Hear that, toad?” his wife chimes in. “Your mother left you behind.”

Odd. When she first encountered this pair, the mother was filled with sunlight while the father never became more than a shadow in the doorway. Now their roles are reversed — the man lays out exactly what he expects of her in a stark white glare, while the woman becomes a mythic monster, howling darkness in both their faces.

“It isn’t true,” Fantine moans. She drops into a crouch to meet her daughter’s eyes. “Cosette, _darling_ , when I left it wasn’t supposed to last this long, but I never forgot about you, never _ever_ , and look, I’m here now.” Cosette retreats away from all the adults and it breaks her heart to think she is lumped in with them. She stands and smooths her skirt, lets her spine become steel. “I’m her mother.”

“Right, and do you have the papers to prove it?” he shoots back. “You certainly don’t have the dead husband you lied to my wife about having. *Imagine*, taking advantage of an honest working woman like that! Anyway, who are they going to believe, a businessman in good standing with the community, or some nobody who comes through town wailing about a kid she gave up?”

It hits her then that the truth doesn’t matter, that reality consists of what the most people believe. That fact got her fired and it will tear Cosette from her arms for good if she can’t think of something fast. She can’t think of anything at all, so she just collapses on the floor while her sorrow overflows.

Through her tears Fantine looks over to where she caught a glimpse of Eurydice when she first entered, but the space is empty, save for a few coins scattered next to her bowl. She prays this does not mean she’s been abandoned on all fronts, and then she has energy only to weep until she is charged double for water damage to the floor and then kicked out.

 

-/-/-

 

The branches join overhead and leave Eurydice in a tunnel of trees. There is only one way to the well; there are a thousand and one ways to get lost here. She takes a breath, holds it, and tries not to examine how it crystallizes in the air when she lets it go. She’s walked this uncertainty countless times before, if not this same ground, and knows the worst thing she could do is panic. But if it were easy to keep away from that ledge, there would be something worse than terror; it takes some time to be able to take even a few steps.

The darkness in the forest is absolute and feels uncomfortably like burial. She’s not sure how she knows enough to draw a comparison — imagination or memory or the same force which sings from three throats, or the woods themselves. Eurydice tugs her hair hard enough to remember that she’s not dead quite yet. Stars might be worse, she convinces herself as she plants one foot after another after another on the ground. Something powerful enough to penetrate this deep could have followed her here or lured her here. No, it’s better to have made it this far with no stars.

It was probably wrong of her to leave Fantine all alone like that, whatever her good intentions. Long ago, before they even met, she promised herself not to stray so far that the voice of someone who needed her couldn’t reach her, but here she is. She’s lost in the undergrowth, not the tangle of her own thoughts, not like — and here the thought flows away from her and she could not say whose name she called, but she’s doing the same thing as that person who could not answer.

The Thénardiers twist around any obstacle until they are free of it she saw enough tonight to know that much. Asking nicely won’t get them what they want, and only encourages them to ask for more. Thankfully, Eurydice can twist and slither just as well, and she will find the places they’re not looking. If the three girls have to run after that, well, she’s has practice in that, too.

 

-/-/-

 

She doesn’t even have to go all the way to the well because she catches Cosette coming back the other way, staggering under the weight of a bucket nearly as heavy as herself. The girl’s tears are almost silent, just a whisper of saltwater against skin, and she only hears it at all because she recognizes a sound her own heart has made. She stops worrying that she has left Fantine in the lurch, because it has brought her exactly where she needed to be to answer _this_ cry.

She scrambles to remember what would have calmed her as a child. At times she finds it difficult to believe she ever was one. “That bucket looks heavy,” she says before the opportunity can slip away from her. “Do you need help with it?”

The girl trembles like a leaf at the sound of a voice in these woods and Eurydice can hardly fault her for her caution. But as a flame in the darkness she shivers closer to a source of warmth which may be sinister but offers hope for now. She lowers the bucket to the ground and her whisper is almost lost in the rustles of a few lonesome leaves. “If you please, the Thénardiers can’t know I’ve been helped. I’d be beaten for sure.”

Outrage flares up in her chest all over again but she turns away from Cosette until she’s sure it won’t show on her face. “What if there were a way,” she says as she lifts the handle, “for us to leave this town without ever needing to see them again?”

“If I’d known, I’d have said goodbye to the dog before I left. He actually loves me, but I don’t care about the rest.” They walk along and she slips her hand into Eurydice’s careful as a thief afraid of detection. Eurydice squeezes back and won’t let go, no matter what winds may blow.

Before too long they make it out of the woods, the journey easier for each of them because they don’t have to make it alone. Their four hands are joined by another pair and they continue on their way. They’ve been to the town where Fantine began her life and to the place Cosette has lived most of hers, but now it’s time for the trio to return to where Eurydice has _her_ roots.


End file.
